NDPR Joseph Stenberg Aquinas on the Ethics of Happiness

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2026.04.8 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Joseph Stenberg, Aquinas on the Ethics of Happiness, Cambridge University Press, 2025, 334pp., $120.00 (hbk) ISBN 9781108478434.

Reviewed by Angela Knobel, University of Dallas

In Aquinas on the Ethics of Happiness, Joseph Stenberg sets out to offer the reader what he describes as a “big-picture reconstruction” of the fundamental elements of Aquinas’s ethics. Stenberg wishes to offer an account of Aquinas’s ethics, which—in his view—is distinctively different from, and at odds with, the “standard” description of it. Specifically, against the “very widely held” view that for Aquinas, “moral norms and moral virtues are fundamentally determined by their relationship to individual happiness”, Stenberg wishes to argue that Aquinas “removes individual happiness from the core of eudaimonism and puts common happiness in its place”, thus “changing the...